Books I read in 2022

This post lists out the books I read in 2022, arranged in chronological order of when they were read. Each section includes some of my favorite excerpts from each book (distinguished in grey), along with any additional commentary or notes I’d like to share with you.

For convenience, here’s an overview of the list, with links that will take you to the excerpts and notes I took from each book. If you read only one book from this list, make it The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. Three other favorites are The End of Trauma by George A. Bonanno, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and Wild Problems by Russ Roberts.

A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the challenges of modern life, by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein

Love is a state of the emotional mind that causes one to prioritize someone or something external as an extension of self. That’s it. Love, the genuine article, is a matter of intimate inclusion. When it is real, there are few forces more powerful. (123)

You can fool a person, and they can fool you, but you can’t fool a tree or a tractor, a circuit or a surfboard. So seek out physical reality, not just social experience. Pursue feedback from the vast university that exists beyond other human beings. Watch your reactions when the feedback comes in. The more time you spend pitting your intellect against realities that cannot be coerced with manipulation o sweet talk, the less likely you are to blame others for your own errors. (196)

There is a tension between conforming and disagreeing in the face of apparent inconsistency. This tension is a hidden strength of humans–the push and pull between wisdom and innovation, between culture and consciousness…It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. (215-216)

The End of Trauma: How the new science of resilience is changing how we think about PTSD, by George A. Bonanno

I learned of this book from an interview with the author on the podcast: Honestly with Bari Weiss, Humans Are More Resilient Than You Think, January 12, 2022. It was a great interview, and it was a nice dose of resilience porn, which I can’t get enough of. The cherry on top: at a certain point in the interview Mr. Bonanno revealed that he follows the Wim Hof Method and goes for cold runs in just shorts and shoes in the winter.

Letting children make mistakes is the greatest thing we can do for them. Provide a safe base and sense of support, but allow them to learn. Encourage them to take chances. Give them the chance to fail. (Noted, likely paraphrased, from an interview on the Honestly Podcast with Bari Weiss, January 12, 2022)

The flexibility mindset is essentially a conviction that we will be able to adapt ourselves to the challenge at hand, that we will do whatever is needed to move forward. At the core of the mindset are three interrelated beliefs: optimism about the future, confidence in our ability to cope, and a willingness to think about a threat as a challenge. Each of these beliefs has been found, independently, to correlate with resilient outcomes. (123)

This next excerpt connects to my article on mythology mobility.

Paul had transformed the stress that had been plaguing him. He reinvented his memory of the assault. He remade it into something he could live with. (195)

[Dr. Wendy Lichtenthal] explained to her [a patient feeling overwhelmed and searching for a way to deal with the chaos and stress of a difficult situation] that in situations like hers, “there is no technical playbook,” but that a flexibility framework can help. That is, she could assess whatever was happening in a given context, attempt a strategy pulled from her repertoire, and then assess how well it was working, and if it wasn’t, “rinse and repeat” until she struck upon a strategy that does work.” Wendy also explained one of the core assumptions about flexibility, suggesting to her patient that “she may notice that because the context is ever-changing, that what worked yesterday may not help her meet her goals today–being flexible in her approaches is what might be most helpful in this uncharted terrain.” (226)

Morality: Restoring the common good in divided times, by Jonathan Sacks

Religion sees morality as given by God. Hayek saw it as the result of evolutionary forces. What these two views held in common, though, was a strong and principled opposition to the idea that individually or collectively we can devise a better system by rational thought alone, so as to maximize happiness or some other good. The law of unintended consequences will always defeat our best intentions. (147)

Understanding comes from the willingness to be challenged…Against the outer wall of the BBC’s new Broadcasting House in London there stands a statue of George Orwell, and engraved above is a sentence he wrote, in very much the same spirit: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” (182)

To survive tragedy and trauma, first build the future. Only then, remember the past. (197)

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The wild and true story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan

I learned about this book from an interview with the author on the Ryen Russillo Podcast. It was a different, fun, and fast read. I loved the movie when I saw it in theaters, and have a much deeper appreciation for it now after reading the book.

George Miller: I think every film that you do is a kind of rehearsal for the next one. (17)

Nico Lathouris: I was slowly developing Max through each of these action sequences: It’s the step-by-step evolution of a human being from an animal. (61)

Colin Gibson: There’s a moment in the race of the War Rig where Charlize is supposed to lock the accelerator on so she can swing out through the side door and begin shooting. I decided to send to American for an old shoe-size measurer that you used to see in the shoe stores in the old days, where kids would put their feet in them and wind up and down that little clicker to find out exactly how fat and long your hoof was. I thought that was a fantastic idea because it does indeed work like an accelerator: You can pump it up and down, but it also has locks. It was a great little shorthand for how to take something totally out of context and repurpose it for battle. (86)

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, by Michael Shellenberger

I learned about this book from an interview with the author on Episode 1719 of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. If you can get past the provocative title, the book offers great insights into the “homeless” problem so many cities are grappling with.

Here are my summarizing notes on what we need to do: (1) build more shelters and short-term safe places with free psychiatric care and drug treatment; (2) break up open-air drug scenes using both social services and law enforcement; (3) develop a system of drug courts, with mandatory drug treatment; and (4) provide abstinence-contingent supportive housing, with incentives to move up and move out.

Research finds that many addicts need mandatory treatment, and that it works nearly as well as voluntary treatment. Noted a team of researchers, “patients who have been forced to enter a substance abuse treatment have shown during and posttreatment results that are quite similar to those shown by supposedly ‘internally motivated’ patients.” Other research finds that mandated drug treatment through specialized “drug courts” aimed at addressing the underlying cause of crime, addiction, is effective in reducing drug use and recidivism, or repeat offending. One study concluded that people sentenced through drug courts were two-thirds less likely to be rearrested than individuals prosecuted through the normal criminal justice system. Another study found that a group of participants in drug courts had its rate of recidivism lowered from 50 percent to 38 percent. Researchers estimated that every dollar allocated to drug courts saves approximately $4 in spending on incarceration and health care. (68-69)

As soon as you use the world “homeless” you find yourself  trapped within a powerful discourse, one that manipulates our thinking and feelings. The people that my staff and I interact with every day outside our office in Berkeley may or may not have homes, relatives, or friends with homes where they could stay. They may or may not have access to shelter. Some do and some don’t. But what they all have in common is usually some combination of mental illness, severe ore not, addition, and disaffiliation. (230, emphasis added)

All Americans, of all political ideologies, religions, social classes, and races, have an interest in focusing our attention, finally, on our nation’s tragically high homicide rates. Stigmatizing hard drug use and breaking up the open-air drug markets will not end drug dealing, but it will significantly reduce the violence associated with drugs by moving the drug trade indoors and thus dispersing it. Doing so may have the added benefit of increasing costs for dealers and users. The American people are capable of distinguishing between stigmatizing fentanyl use without stigmatizing the sick person who is using fentanyl. The person requires our compassion, but the behavior requires our condemnation. We need a new, pro-human, pro-civilization, and pro-cities morality. Freedom is essential, but without order it can’t exist in cities. If we are not safe, if our cities are not walkable, then we don’t have a civilization. (262-263)

Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, by Matti Friedman

I learned about this book from an interview with the author on the EconTalk podcast.

The prayer that inspired “Who by Fire” is one of the three moments in the Yom Kippur service that have become linked, at least in my own mind, to this story.

Another moment occurs in the afternoon, when the congregation reads the Book of Jonah and its account of the wayward prophet’s journey–not just his physical voyage from the land of Israel to dissolute Nineveh, but his trajectory from believing you can run away from God and fate to knowing that you can’t. The book begins with Jonah escaping to the Mediterranean and ends with him immobile in the desert. He’s been brought against his will to the attitude of the other Biblical prophets who respond to the divine summons by simply saying, “Here I am” – hineini. That Hebrew word appears in the Bible for the first time in the story of ISaac, spoken by Abraham when he hears God’s voice. Abraham is about to be told to commit the most terrible act he can imagine. Saying hineini is the opposite of running away. At the end of his life, Cohen released a song called “You Want it Darker.”  It’s addressed to God. The theme is the futility of our maneuvers in a script that we never write.

If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game.
If you are the healer, I’m crippled and lame.
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame.
You want it darker.
We kill the flame.

The song was produced by Cohen’s son, Adam, who was a year old when his father left Hydra to go to Sinai. The words are in English, except for one: hineini. If you listen to the track you hear that word sung by someone else, a rare appearance in a Cohen song of a male voice that isn’t his. When Cohen reached back at the end of his life, he didn’t go to his Buddhist monastery, to India, Hydra, French Canada, or the Village. He went back to the synagogue of his childhood, the one built by the Cohens in Westmount. The voice belongs to Gideon Zelermyer, the cantor at the Gate of Heaven.

The song includes a fragment from the Jewish mourners’ prayer, the Kaddish: “Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name.” Some listeners, knowing what happened a few months after the song’s release in 2016, believe that Cohen was saying the Kaddish for himself, that he knew he didn’t have much longer. But Robert Kory, the signer’s friend and last manager, remembers Cohen calling him up in the summer of 2015 to hear the first cut of the song. Kory made the short trip from his office in Beverly Hills to the poet’s home in Hancock Park. Cohen was ill at the time, Kory said, but expected to recover. He was even talking about a new tour. Cohen played “You Want it Darker” for him in the living room. The song was a prediction of a somber future not just for Cohen but for everyone. America was taking a darker turn, but there weren’t many who felt it in the summer of 2015. Kory remembers feeling a chill in his bones, and asking Cohen if he couldn’t come up with a brighter vision for their children and grandchildren. “I don’t write the songs,” Cohen said. (180-182)

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield

This book is a classic, simple, and strong kick in the pants to get moving and get to work. I plan to read it every year. Here are some lines worth remembering.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. (12)

The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day. (14)

The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more we can be sure that we have to do it. (40)

If you’re paralyzed with fear, it’s a good sign. It shows you what you have to do. (41)

No matter what, I will never let Resistance beat me. (88)

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier

I learned about this book from an interview with the author on the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss: Courage in the Face of Book Burners. Ms. Shrier also gave a great speech at Princeton, which the Honestly podcast also shared, here.

This book is an eye-opening, tough, and sad read. It shines a rational, nuanced, considerate, and brave light on a third-rail topic that often gets milked, and distorted across the political and ideological spectrum.

I have no doubt that legislators who pass anti-bullying laws and educators and school boards who implement gender identity and sexual orientation education are sincerely concerned about the welfare of LGBTQ-identified students–as all decent human beings ought to be. But where a measure taken to fix a problem goes so far in excess of remedy, it becomes clear that simple remedy was not primarily what the fixer had in mind.

This is the sense in which so much gender identity and sexual orientation education, delivered with the tireless passion of priests, is pretext for an ulterior aim. There is simply no good reason for insisting that students be made to imagine themselves as gay or transgender or pansexual. There is no very good reason to imagine they might be a boy in a girl’s body or a girl in a boy’s. There is no reason to teach students, in the words of one of the most high regarded school manuals, that the “expression of transgender identity, or any other form of gender-expansive behavior, is a healthy, appropriate and typical aspect of human development.”

All that’s required is the insistence that students display decency, civility, and kindness to their classmates. Follow the Golden Rule. Stand up to bullies. Any singling out of others for their differences–physical, religious, sexual, or otherwise–should be met with neither indulgence nor toleration. Bad behavior should be met with swift punishment. (72-73)

And that’s when it dawned on me what all this “safety” is about. Why schools must declare themselves “safe zones” for LGBTQ students. Why the schools have special forms on which to record new names and pronouns for transgender-identified students, which they keep to themselves. Why so much vigilance is needed to ward off anti-LGBTQ bullying. Why schools sacrifice so much instructional time to the year-round celebration of outré sexual orientations and gender identities. It is because of a belief, held to be self-evident by gender activists and their lackeys in the school system: Bullies are forever circling trans-identified students. They torment these kids whenever they fail to affirm them. They cruelly refuse to use these kids’ new names and even sometimes reject the kids’ transgender identities altogether.

These bullies must be beaten back with every new LGBTQ policy and so much febrile instruction. They are the barbarians outside the schoolyard gates that teachers are working so hard to fend off. Children’s welfare–as defined by activists–is not their priority. These bullies, who know next to nothing about gender theory or queer theory, are officious intermeddlers in school policy and teacher instruction.

They aren’t even embarrassed by their own ignorance. They really shouldn’t be considered at all, except that America’s backward laws insist on allowing the intrusion.

They go by “Mom” and “Dad.” (76-77)

For many classic sufferers of gender dysphoria, celebration of their trans identity is anathema. They aren’t looking to show off a “costume,” they want to be accepted as the real thing. “I knew I looked like a man in women’s clothing,” Kristal said. “But it became a freak show. I couldn’t have dinner in a restaurant with strangers hugging you. It was really bizarre. It was a really strange experience. So I felt that something weird was happening, and everywhere I went, people were asking my opinion on Caitlyn Jenner and, you know, it was just, it was awful.”

Kristal’s gender dysphoria has been an unrelenting source of discomfort. She doesn’t want to be celebrated and she certainly doesn’t want to make other women uneasy. In fact, she says, transgender people’s ability to use the bathrooms of their choosing was really no issue until the activists politicized it. “I mean, they’re cubicles, you walk in, you do your business, you walk out.”

She abhors what she sees as efforts by trans activists to make biological women feel unsafe, and she says the gender idealogues’ “pseudoscience is nuts.” Kristl knows that she is biologically male; she simply feels most comfortable presenting as a woman. “I don’t think you can throw out the science of DNA just because of people’s feelings.” (146-147)

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, by Michael Easter

This was one of my favorite books I read in 2022. I was particularly inspired by the concept of the misogi: “using epic challenges in nature to cleanse the defilements of the modern world.” (32). I’m planning to start an annual misogi tradition in 2023, although I’m still not sure what it will be. Here is more on misogi, along with rules and guidelines.

“In misogi we’re using the artificial, contrived concept of going out and doing a hard task to mimic these challenges that humans used to face all the time. These challenges  that our environment used to naturally show us  that we’re so removed from now…Then when we return to the Wild West of our everyday lives we are better for it. We have the right tools for the job.” – Dr. Marcus Elliott (35)

“In our model of misogi, there are only two rules…Rule number one is that it has to be really fucking hard. Rule number two is that you can’t die…We’re generally guided by the idea that you should have a fifty percent chance of success–if you do everything right.” – Dr. Marcus Elliott (40)

The misogi should be “quirky. Creative. Far out. Something uncommon…And the reason for this is because the more quirky the misogi, the less chance you can compare it to anything else…It’s important to take on challenges that are your challenges. Misogi is you against you. It’s against this phenomenon of ‘Oh, that guy did this thing in this amount of time and I’m going to try to do it faster.’ Because that’s comparison shopping. And that’s just such a shitty way to go through life.” – Dr. Marcus Elliott (47)

Don’t advertise misogi. Don’t advertise misogi. It’s OK to talk about misogi with friends and family. But you don’t Tweet, Instagram, Facebook, or boast about misogi. (47)

And here are two more excerpts I really liked.

Learning new skills–particularly the ones humans needed for millions of years that require us to use our mind and body–would stay with me beyond Alaska in a very Zen, the-path-is-the-goal type of way. There was all the new expertise I was picking up. But learning new skills is also one of the best ways to enhance awareness of the present moment, with no burning incense, Buddhist mantras, or meditation apps involved. (61)

In our pursuit of better living we’ve allowed comfort to calcify our natural movements and strengths. Without conscious discomfort and purposeful exercise–a forceful push against comfort creep–we’ll only continue to become weaker and sicker. (251)

A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious, by Roya Hakakian

I was inspired to read this book after listening to the author on the April 26, 2021 episode of EconTalk: Roya Hakakian on A Beginner’s Guide to America – Econlib.

Faith, you will soon learn, is best when you turn to it at your will, not when it is peddled to you at every turn. (55)

The search for a home will be your perennial quest. No matter where you go, you will always be looking for it. Consider the white serenity of the page. You might find that it can be a haven in its own right. Why think of home as a physical place at all? Words can be the bricks to a trustier home in the mind. (185, emphasis added)

You are waiting for a stamp in your passport, the nine-digit numeric benediction that launches millions from everywhere to enter into the green card lottery. The card you will get in a year will primarily be white, and it will bear this very number. Roughly [3.5] by 2 inches, it will allow you to cross from an uncertain life over which you had no control to an uncertain life that will be of your making–to a preferable form of uncertainty. (5-6, emphasis added)

If you come from a land where women must don the veil, you will be stunned to see veil-less women walk about. You will be even more stunned to see a few veiled ones passing them by, each paying no mind to the other. The two versions of Eve you thought cuckold never mix are milling about before your very eyes. This is another American miracle, not only of harmony among ethnicities but also beliefs. (9, emphasis added)

Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, by Russ Roberts

This was another great book I read this past year, written by Russ Roberts, the host of EconTalk, one of my favorite podcasts. It’s a refreshing, and pretty quick and light read. However, I find it’s messages popping up all over the place, long after I finished reading. It’s particularly useful if you’re grappling with a tough decision or facing a fork in the road. Here are a  couple excerpts I liked.

Life choices that turn out differently from what we hoped aren’t mistakes. They’re just choices that turned out differently than we hoped. We shouldn’t call those mistakes. You shouldn’t beat yourself up over them. Forgive yourself. Wild problems that don’t turn out well aren’t mistakes. They’re more like adventures. Adventures have twists and turns…If you can go on an adventure that you can end without great cost, go. If it turns out badly, cut it short. If it turns out well, enjoy the ride. This beats trying to figure out in advance with any precision which adventures are the best ones. (166-167)

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, “The only way to understand marriage is to get married. The only way to understand whether a certain career path is right for you is to actually try it for an extended period. Those who hover on the edge of a commitment, reluctant to make a decision until all the facts are in, will eventually find that life has passed them by. The only way to understand a way of life is to take the risk living it.” All the facts are never in. One way to avoid letting life pass you by is to stop worrying about making a “mistake.” It’s not a mistake when you can’t do any better. So spend less time on figuring out the “right” decision and more time on thinking about how to widen your options and how to cope with disappointment if the decision turns out badly. (169)

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham

I learned of this book from an interview with the author on this episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

I tweaked my behavior in four main ways after reading this book: (1) no more raw eggs in my smoothies; (2) I rarely eat raw vegetables anymore; (3) increased consumption of hot food and warm beverages; and (4) I have a better appreciation for the evolutionary and social benefits of enjoying a nice, slow, big meal at the end of a long day with friends and loved ones.

The Inuit probably ate more raw animal products than other societies, but like every culture the main meal of the day was taken in the evening. (30) I have found no exceptions to the evening meal being the main reported meal for hunter-gatherers. (Note to page 30, at 217-218, emphasis added)

The principal way cooking achieves its increased digestibility is by gelatinization. Starch inside plant cells comes as dense little packages of stored glucose called granules. The granules are less than a tenth of a millimeter (four-thousandths of an inch) long, too small to be seen with the naked eye or to be damaged by the milling of flour, and they are so stable that in a dry environment they can persist for tens of thousands of years. However, as starch granules are warmed up in the presence of water they start to swell–at around 58 degrees Celsius (136 degrees Fahrenheit) in the case of wheat starch, a well-studied and representative sample. The granules swell because hydrogen bonds in the glucose polymers weaken when they are exposed to heat, and this causes the tight crystalline structure to loosen. By 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees Fahrenheit), still below boiling, the granules are disrupted into fragments. At this point the glucose chains are unprotected, and gelatinize. Starch does not necessarily stay gelatinized after being cooked. In day-old bread the starch reverts and becomes resistant. This might help explain why we like to toast bread after it has lost its initial freshness.

Gelatinization happens whenever starch is cooked, whether in the baking of bread, the gelling of pie fillings, the production of pasta, the fabrication of starch-based snack foods, the thickening of sauces, or, we can surmise, the tossing of a wild root into a fire. As long as water is present, even from the dampness of a fresh plant, the more that starch is cooked, the more it is gelatinized. The more starch is gelatinized, the more easily enzymes can reach it, and therefore the more completely it is digested. Thus cooked starch yields more energy than raw. (59-60, emphasis added)

In the late 1990s a Belgian team of gastroenterologists tested the effects of cooking for the first time, using a new research tool that allowed the investigators to follow the fate of egg proteins after they had been swallowed. (63-64)
…
Cooking increased the protein value of eggs by around 40 percent. The Belgian scientists considered the reason for this dramatic effect on nutritional value and concluded that the major factor was denaturation of the food proteins, induced by heat. Denaturation occurs when the internal  bonds of a protein weaken, causing the molecule to open up. As a result, the protein molecule loses its original three-dimensional structure and therefore its natural biological function. The gastroenterologists noted that heat predictably denatures proteins, and that denaturated proteins are more digestible because their open structure exposes them to the action of digestive enzymes. (65, emphasis added)
…
Heat is only one of several factors that promote denaturation. Three others are acidity, sodium chloride, and drying, all of which humans use in different ways. (65)

Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited. Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food. Pair-bonds solve the problem. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered foods will not be taken by others; having a wife ensures the man will have an evening meal. According to this idea, cooking created a simple marriage system; or perhaps it solidified a preexisting version of married life that could have been prompted by hunting or sexual competition. Either way, the result was a primitive protection racket in which husbands used their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed, and women returned the favor by preparing their husbands’ meals. The many beneficial aspects of the household, such as provisioning by males, increases in labor efficiency, and creation of a social network for child-rearing, were additions consequent to solving the more basic problem: female needed male protection, specifically because of cooking. A male used his social power to both ensure that a female did not lose her food, and to guarantee his own meal by assigning the work of cooking to the female. (154-155, emphasis added)

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, by Daniel Yergen

One of the best ways to strengthen and mix up your media diet is to read books that the smart people in your life are reading. I picked up this book after a colleague at work mentioned he was reading it, and I enjoyed the history, anecdotes, and the lucid perspective on the global energy landscape. Here are some of my favorite excerpts.

[T]here is a risk that the commanding position of the United States–derived from its capital markets and the dollar–could be eroded over time by the overreliance on financial sanctions, because nations will find alternatives. Two years after the Unites States imposed financial sanctions on Russia, Obama treasury secretary [Jacob] Lew himself warned, “The more we condition the use of the dollar and our financial system on adherence to U.S. foreign policy, the more risk of migration to other currencies and other financial systems in the medium term grows. Such outcomes would not be in the best interests of the United States. (97)

Relevant to the excerpts on sanctions discussed above, and the ongoing war with Russia in Ukraine, I found this nugget in The Economist relevant and interesting:

Instead the lesson from Ukraine and Russia is that confronting aggressive autocracies requires action on several fronts. Hard power is essential. Democracies must cut their exposure to adversaries’ choke points. Sanctions play a vital role, but the West should not let them proliferate. The more that countries fear Western sanctions tomorrow, the less willing they will be to enforce embargoes on others today. (The Economist, August 27, 2022, Leaders section, Are sanctions on Russia working?)

Chapter 13: Oil and the State is a short and excellent chapter about how Russia survived the double-barrelled shocks in 2014 from sanctions and a collapse in oil prices. To paraphrase: they closed insolvent banks and allowed the ruble to float. The devalued ruble had no effect on industry activities (e.g., oil and agriculture) because their expenditures were all in rubles. This made imported goods more expensive, and domestically produced Russian goods much more competitive. Their “rainy day” sovereign wealth funds that had been built up from 2000 to 2011 also helped weather the storm.

By now most of the oil exporters were in extreme distress. Nigeria, with 175 million people, depended on oil for 70 percent of its budget. In Russia, wealth was fast draining from its sovereign wealth fund. Saudi Arabia, running a deficit, was accelerating the drawdown of its large foreign reserves. Iraq’s oil revenues had collapsed. In 2015, Venezuela, desperate, suggested to other OPEC countries that they organized an “environmental campaign inside the U.S.” against shale. (278, emphasis added)

In 2011, following the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, Germany set out to close its seventeen nuclear reactors by 2022. Yet between 2011 and 2019, China added thirty-four new nuclear reactors, double the number of reactors that have closed in Germany. A few nuclear reactors have closed in the United States because of the difficulty of competing against inexpensive natural gas, but close to a hundred reactors are operating, providing 20 percent of U.S. electricity. As for natural gas, the growth of its contribution to total world energy in 2018 was more than double that of renewables. Adding it all up, energy transition is complex and requires some perspective. (401, emphasis added)

Oil and natural gas are also the feedstock for petrochemicals, from which chemicals and plastics are made. A growing movement focuses on limiting the use of plastic straws and single-use plastic bags, especially owning to ocean pollution and the debris washing up on beaches. In Washington, D.C., “straw cops” hand out fines to restaurants that covertly use plastic straws, which are now banned. Recyclability to replace single-use plastics has become a priority. This is seen as part of the “circular economy,” where products are reused, recycled, or remade at the end of their lives–instead of going into landfills.

But the plastic waste problem is largely not in the developed world. The United States generates less than 1 percent of the plastic waste in oceans. About 90 percent of river-sourced plastic pollution in the oceans comes from uncontrolled dumping into ten rivers in Asia and Africa, which, if properly managed, could dramatically reduce the wastage. Plastic bags and straws may be the most visible use of plastics, but they constitute less than 2 percent of plastics. (416, emphasis added)

[On the Arab Spring that turned into the Arab Winter] In Egypt in late January 2011, demonstrators poured into and around Tahrir Square in Cairo, eventually as many as a million people. However disparate their politics, their common objective was to force out the eighty-two-year-old Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president for three decades. Connected by Facebook and Twitter, captured on global television, they quickly came to be seen around the world as the vanguard of a new, modern generation.
…
Mubarak had been a resolute ally, key to peace with Israel and to the 1991 Gulf War coalition (praised by George H. W. Bush as “my wise friend”), and then in the campaign against Al Qaeda. Barack Obama’s senior advisors–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Vice President Joe Biden–urged caution in joining the rush to push Mubarak out. Gates was on the National Security Council in 1979 when, in his view, the United States had pulled the rug out from under the shah, with the expectation that democratic revolution would follow. The result instead was the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, U.S. diplomates held hostage for 444 days, and the implacably hostile Islamic Republic.

The more junior advisers around the president vigorously disagreed. They were caught up by the excitement of the Arab Spring and felt an affinity for the Facebook and Twitter generation. Sure of the power and sweep of Obama’s oratory, they urged the president to not hesitate in pushing Mubarak aside. They told Obama that he should be “on the right side of history.”

“But how can anyone know which is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side of history,” Gates later wrote, “when nearly all revolutions, begun with hope and idealism, culminate in repression and bloodshed? After Mubarak, what?” (237, emphasis added)